"My hypothesis is that… these monsters… are the missing miners themselves."
The masked boy's words hung in the air for a long moment.
Then, one after another, the others' reactions erupted:
"WHAT?!"
"T-That's impossible!"
"The miners… turned into those monsters?" Alvern stared at him with wide eyes, his voice wavering between disbelief and horror. "Are you saying they underwent some kind of… metamorphosis?"
Mirac weighed his answer before speaking:
"Exactly…"
Team leader Alvern ran a hand over his face, eyes still wide. "This is insane! How could something like this even happen?!"
No one said a word.
A thousand hypotheses swirled in everyone's minds, but none had the strength or clarity to voice them.
Yet even though no one dared say it out loud, a single, sinister suspicion had begun to worm its way into their thoughts—heavy and undeniable.
The only plausible explanation capable of accounting for this unnatural horror:
'It must be the work of a Chaotic!'
Felisia dropped the scrap of cloth as if it burned her. Roric and Aisha flinched.
Darick, Brann, and Morwen slowly lowered their weapons, as if they had suddenly become too heavy. Lirael gripped her bow until her knuckles turned white, and Seren did the same with her fan.
For once, Joren found nothing to say: the mocking smile had died on his lips. Even Ananya, who had remained silent until that moment, looked equally shocked—it was written clearly on her face.
Mirac, standing motionless at the center of that circle of lost gazes, was struggling to believe the scenario himself. But after everything he had experienced since his reincarnation, he had learned to digest the surreal faster than the others.
So, refusing to be overwhelmed by the initial shock, he immediately stood up and began scanning the vast Rail Hall, carefully studying the Rogthar corpses.
"Captain, look," Mirac said, pointing at the horned Rogthar. "All these monsters still have remains of the miners' uniforms on them… except for the horned one."
Darick immediately approached and crouched beside the body.
He carefully examined the black loincloth, different from the brown ones of the others, with beige stitching and two clearly visible emblems: that of the Raerno Merchants' Company and, next to it, a second one with crossed swords beneath stars.
"The boy is right," Darick confirmed, his voice grave. "These rags definitely belong to a local guard's uniform."
Mirac nodded, then continued in a firm tone, still tinged with tension:
"The mission documents stated that a large operational staff was employed in the mine: supervisors, engineers, extraction technicians, machinery operators, rail maintenance workers, and so on. But around here there are only miners' uniforms and that of a single guard. Nothing else. Not to mention we haven't found the slightest trace of the first reconnaissance team sent yesterday. Therefore… there are two possibilities…"
He paused briefly, his gaze drifting toward the dark mouths of the deeper tunnels.
"Either all the people I mentioned were devoured by the horde we just fought… or they too suffered the same fate and are now somewhere in mutated form in the depths of the mine… Or worse still, they're already out there in the outside world, hidden in the forest or some other remote location!"
Total silence.
No one spoke.
No one could find the words to refute the conclusion the masked boy had reached. Not because they lacked the will, but because the reasoning behind it was solid, cold, and unassailable.
As expected from his role as team leader, Alvern was the first to recover.
"I see…" he murmured, letting the word settle for a moment.
Then, his voice grew firmer:
"In any case, the exploration of the mine can end here. We came out victorious against this horde, but our group might not be prepared to face what we could find further ahead. And besides, I have no intention of risking losing anyone else because of this place…"
Everyone's gaze instinctively slid toward Zoltan. The Shaman's body remained exactly where it had fallen, the spear still embedded in his skull, but the blood had long since stopped flowing from the wound.
"The mission concerned the disappearance of the raw iron and the agents sent yesterday for the investigation. We've obtained the answers we were looking for in both cases, so we have no reason to stay here any longer: quickly collect some samples of these monsters, recover the remaining iron load from the depot, and return to headquarters to report back."
The group nodded in unison.
Following Alvern's orders, Morwen strode decisively toward Dorran's enormous backpack to retrieve canvas sacks with which they would collect as many samples as possible.
When she reached the far end of the hall, she found Blake asleep on a cloth spread on the ground. Beside him, Dorran stared into the void, his glassy gaze lost on an invisible horizon.
Although she felt the impulse to help him, the tattooed woman said nothing.
'I'm not good at comforting others…' she thought, rummaging through the huge backpack and pulling out a handful of sturdy canvas sacks.
Afterward, Morwen returned to the others at the center of the hall and silently distributed the sacks, one to each.
One by one, the team members began collecting everything they thought would be useful for identifying those monsters: fragments of chitinous skin, claws, fangs, even the horned beast's head. Its sword, on the other hand, ended up in the custody of team leader Alvern.
It was while watching his companions at work that something clicked in Dorran. He blinked several times, as if waking from a nightmare, and shook his head to chase away the thoughts that had clouded his mind.
'I can't just stay here doing nothing!'
Without waiting for anyone to say anything, Dorran stood up, opened his enormous backpack, and pulled out a thick, dark blanket along with a sturdy folding stretcher.
No one had asked him. No one had given him orders.
Yet he already knew what he had to do.
In silence, he approached Zoltan's corpse and knelt to his right.
At that moment, Roric noticed him out of the corner of his eye. He instantly understood his intentions and joined him without hesitation.
He didn't say a single word, simply kneeling on the other side of the body, ready to help.
Together, with slow and measured movements, they first extracted the spear from the Shaman's skull—a gesture that required a steadiness not everyone would have—then carefully wrapped him in the dark blanket, covering everything: hands, face, feet. Finally, they laid him on the stretcher and fastened the side straps with almost ritual precision.
Afterward, the two each grabbed one end of the stretcher and lifted it from the ground.
Meanwhile, Brann had approached Blake.
The boy was still sleeping, his breathing slow, his pale face gradually regaining its natural color.
Brann crouched down, picked him up with a gentleness one wouldn't expect from someone of his build, and slowly rose so as not to disturb the tall, slender boy's rest.
After filling the sacks with the necessary samples, Mirac and Carmen retrieved their respective backpacks. Then, one after another, the team members lit their torches, and the flickering light spread through the hall, ready to accompany them along the path toward the exit.
Alvern scanned the hall one last time, his eyes moving over the rails, the overturned wagons, and the Rogthar bodies scattered everywhere.
Then he turned toward the mouth of the main tunnel.
"Let's go."
* * *
The march back was silent.
Not the previous silence, filled with tension, everyone on guard, eyes scanning every corner. It was a different silence, heavier, the kind that settles into the muscles and slows your steps.
Everyone carried with them not only the fatigue of battle, but also the weight of the truths that had emerged down there.
Their feet trod the same iron sleepers, the same rusted rails they had traversed a few hours earlier, but the journey seemed longer than they remembered.
When they finally reached the Main Depot, Alvern raised his closed fist.
Stop.
The team halted instantly, immediately going on guard.
'Another enemy?' Mirac thought, instinctively bringing his hand to the hilt of his sword.
But when his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he realized it wasn't that…
"What the hell-?!" he murmured, frowning behind the mask.
The first time they had passed through here, they had found enormous wooden crates—some stacked on top of each other.
Relieved to have found the missing raw iron load, they had decided to recover it on the way back, at the end of the exploration, so as to deliver it to Mr. Voss.
But when they arrived at the Main Depot, the team found themselves facing a completely different scene…
The wooden crates were still there, only… this time they found them all open!
And not only that: when they approached to look inside, the flickering torchlight revealed that they were all empty!
All of them, without exception!
"Shit!" Joren burst out, his voice cracked with frustration. "The iron load is gone!"
"Someone must have stolen it during our battle!" Darick exclaimed.
"Maybe it was those red monsters? Or others of their kind?" Morwen suggested.
"Not necessarily!" Brann replied. "Maybe it was the horde we faced earlier that opened these crates while passing toward the Rail Hall."
"Or," Roric intervened, "the horde that attacked us initially included a greater number of enemies than the ones we faced! It's possible they split up once they reached the Main Depot: one group continued on to reach us in the Rail Hall, while the other took care of carrying away the iron. After all, even the masked boy had hypothesized that the rest of the transformed personnel might not be in the depths of the mine, but somewhere out there."
"If that's the case, we might be facing another ambush as soon as we get out of here!" Dorran exclaimed, his voice betraying a concern he struggled to hide.
"I doubt it…" Felisia said, crossing her arms. "Think about it: if their goal was really to seize the raw iron, they've already got it. It wouldn't make any sense to stick around the mine waiting for us, risking another fight. The most logical move, after taking the load, would be to get away as quickly as possible and return where they came from. And I imagine these monsters are intelligent enough to figure that out on their own."
"Yeah okay, but why would monsters be interested in raw iron?" Seren murmured.
The hypotheses chased one another, overlapping without finding an answer.
In the midst of that flurry of theories, Carmen stepped away from the group and took a few steps forward, her eyes slowly scanning from one crate to another. She approached the nearest one and examined it carefully, using the light of her own torch.
"That's strange…" the red-haired woman said, without raising her voice.
The chatter died down. One by one, the team members turned toward her.
"There are no signs of forced entry," Carmen continued, running her fingers along the hinges and edges of the wood. "The lids are wide open, but undamaged. The hinges are intact. The wood isn't splintered. Nothing's been forced." She paused, her gaze quickly sliding over the other crates. "And the same goes for all the others."
"There's more," Mirac said, stepping forward a few paces and pointing at the rails that disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. "The wagons are all in place, exactly as we found them. No one has touched them."
"So?" Joren said, crossing his arms.
"So," Mirac replied calmly, "if someone really wanted to take the raw iron, the wagons would have been the most obvious means. Fast, efficient, already available. Yet not even one was used. And it wouldn't make sense for creatures intelligent enough to organize an ambush not to have thought of such an obvious and convenient solution. Not to mention that, with the robustness and superhuman strength they demonstrated, they could have carried the crates away whole on their shoulders without the slightest effort. Instead they're all still here, empty and intact…"
A brief but dense silence fell over the group.
"Are you saying they were idiots?" Joren murmured, with a hint of irony in his voice, in an attempt to discredit him in front of everyone.
"I'm saying," Mirac replied, ignoring Joren's tone, "that perhaps there was nothing to steal in the first place…"
That hypothesis left the group in a dead end of confusion.
"Have you lost your mind? Are you suggesting they were empty from the beginning?!" Joren burst out, waving a hand toward the open crates. "You're raving, brat! I checked them myself when we arrived here. I tried lifting a couple and they were heavy, damn heavy. They were full, I guarantee it."
Mirac didn't flinch.
He knew Joren wasn't lying.
After all, as soon as they had set foot in the Main Depot, his ability "Instant Knowledge of Mass" had analyzed the environment, returning the numerical values of every single load. And those values, imprinted in his memory, did not match at all with the current weight of the empty crates.
And at this point, thinking about it carefully, not even with what the weight of the raw iron should have been…
But if it wasn't the raw iron, then…
"The crates weren't empty…" Mirac murmured. "They simply didn't contain what we thought…"
He approached one of the crates and, borrowing Carmen's torch, examined the bottom.
Then he moved to the next one, and the one after that, proceeding to check them all.
"What is he looking for?" was the unspoken question hanging in the air as they watched the masked boy rummage through the empty crates.
Suddenly, Mirac stopped in front of one of the central crates. He leaned forward, studying a specific spot where the wooden planks fit together.
He turned to Carmen with a silent nod. She understood immediately and approached to hold the torch for him.
With his free hand, Mirac rummaged in the darkest corner of the bottom and, wedged between the gaps in the planks, pulled out a scrap of dark brown cloth with reinforced stitching.
Identical to the loincloths the Rogthars had been wearing.
He held it up to the torchlight without saying a word, letting the others do the math themselves.
And the math added up, one after another, cold and inexorable.
"Inside these crates there wasn't the raw iron load… but the horde of monsters we faced," Mirac said at last, in a voice that left no room for interpretation.
The silence that followed his words lasted less than an instant, until it was shattered by the others' reactions:
"What?! Hidden inside the crates?!" Darick exclaimed, his voice cracked with disbelief.
"That would explain why they were heavy…" Aisha murmured.
"So, a little while ago, we walked right past the enemy without noticing?!" Roric asked, his voice breaking in the middle.
"I-I can't believe it…" Brann's voice cracked as he clutched Blake, still unconscious, as if to protect him from that revelation.
"No, wait a moment!" Joren interrupted the group's chatter with his usual sharp tone. "Why would they have hidden inside the crates?"
"It could be that," Felisia intervened, reasoning out loud, "after running into the first reconnaissance team, they knew reinforcements would arrive. To set up an ambush for us, they hid in here and waited for us to pass, ready to cut off our only escape route and attack us from behind…"
"The reasoning checks out," Seren admitted bitterly, "but only assuming the horde was already here yesterday and got the better of the first team."
"Do you think they really… ate them?" Dorran murmured, in a voice that hoped not to receive an answer.
"Whatever happened," Alvern said, shaking his head, "it must have taken place in the depths of the mine. Otherwise, if there had been resistance here or in the main tunnel, we would have found traces of battle along our path. It's clear, then, that they turned this place into their den, and that the entire transformed species is holed up in the deeper tunnels. And the ones we faced today were probably tasked with standing guard and getting rid of any intruders who arrived."
He paused briefly, as if putting together the last pieces.
"As for the raw iron load, on the other hand… it's likely that the miners and the rest of the operational staff were transformed shortly after the previous delivery, before they could extract more. That would explain why the crates were empty. That way… everything falls into place."
Mirac said nothing.
He only felt a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature of the mine as his eyes sought Carmen's.
She was already looking at him.
No words. No gesture.
But it was clear that both had reached the same, identical, chilling conclusion:
'Whoever is responsible for this... must be stopped as soon as possible!'
* * *
The team emerged from the Carameo Mine in silence, one after another, just as they had entered.
The sunlight greeted them with an almost offensive brutality. Too bright, too warm, too welcoming compared to everything they had been through in the last couple of hours.
Mirac squinted under the mask, letting his vision adjust.
The yard was exactly as they had left it: the rusted rails stretching out from the mouth of the mine, the twelve abandoned carts and the horses harnessed to the shafts, still there waiting for someone who had never returned for them.
Roric glanced at the nearest trough. It was completely empty, exactly as they had found it upon arrival.
At that sight, something inside him tightened.
Without saying anything, he turned toward Dorran.
The boy understood immediately.
After that knowing glance, the two lowered the stretcher to the ground with care, making sure not to jolt it.
Dorran then opened his enormous backpack and pulled out what remained of the food supplies and one of the water barrels—still half full.
Without anyone asking him, Roric immediately set to work, distributing food and water into the troughs one by one.
The horses neighed softly, lowering their muzzles toward the troughs with a simple and immediate gratitude that tugged at the heart.
"A team will come back to retrieve them tomorrow," Alvern said, observing the scene with his arms crossed.
Afterward, without further delay, the team set off again along the path that descended toward the forest.
The path was narrow, the descent steep, and everyone's mental exhaustion was now beyond any reasonable limit.
Yet no one stopped, no one complained.
When they reached the point where the forest grew denser, the coachman was already waiting for them. He had remained hidden among the larches as Alvern had ordered, still gripping the reins, his face betraying a relief he couldn't quite hide upon seeing them arrive.
He counted them with his eyes, one by one.
Then he lowered his gaze to the stretcher and said nothing.
"We're heading back to Raerno," Alvern said, climbing onto the cart.
The others followed him in silence, positioning themselves on the sides so as to leave the necessary space in the center for the stretcher bearing Zoltan's body.
The coachman nodded, turned the horses, and the cart set off again along the dusty path.
The Carameo Mine soon disappeared behind the curve of the trees, swallowed by the mountain as if it had never existed.